OpenWrt is a sweet distro for wireless routers. However, doing certain stuffs with it, e.g. setting up OpenVPN, is not an easy task. There are many wiki pages, forum threads, and blog posts to help us mortal to get OpenVPN running, but most of them involves a blood sacrifice to the God of Iptables as the mandatory first step. Iptables?? Surely there must be a less painful way?

After some trials and errors, I managed to get OpenVPN to work on OpenWrt, without typing any iptables command. Not everything can be done via the Luci web interface though, so expect to get your hands dirty with the command line. With that said, here are the steps for the typical road warrior setup (tested on Backfire 10.03).

Click the edit icon for sample_server. Click the Swith to advanced configuration link. Click the VPN options tab. Select Push options to peer from the Additional Field list, and click Add. Then, select custom and type route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 (change this accordingly if lan is not on 192.168.1.0/24).